Material Girls: Dance, Decadence, and the Robotics of Pleasure in L'Eve future

The encounter between the Decadent dandy and the female performer of the popular stage provides an excellent opportunity to study the transition from the self-enclosed Decadent texts of the late nineteenth century to the early Modernism that embraces what the original dandies tried so hard to avoid: mass culture and the crowds. At once decadent novel and modern science fiction tale, L'Eve future stages the interaction between fin-de-siècle literature and popular cuIture. The story of a dandy's unhappy affair with a small-time danseuse and the subsequent-construction of a female android to replace her, this novel confronts directly questions of mass culture, mechanical reproduction, and the industrialization of the human body. (RKG)